What the Carpenter Saw
by raedbard
Summary: Season 7: a little screwy with his medication, Seer!Xander muses on Scooby dynamics and realises the solution to the upcoming battle with Caleb and the First is staring him in the face.


Title: What the Carpenter Saw  
Author Raedbard  
Rating: PG-13  
Pairing: Willow/Xander friendship, or Xander gen!fic  
Timeline: S7, somewhere in the middle of 'Empty Places'

Summary: a little screwy with his medication, Seer!Xander muses on Scooby dynamics and realises the solution to the upcoming battle with Caleb and the First is staring him in the face.

WHAT THE CARPENTER SAW

_The reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.  
_Douglas Adams, 'So long and Thanks for All the Fish'

_animus_, -_i_ (m) (Latin)  
(i) the spiritual or rational principle of life in man, opposed to corpus, the body.  
(ii) the seat of feeling, the heart.  
(Note that the Greeks thought that emotion or feeling was located in the stomach.)

_spiritus_, -_us_ (m) (Latin)  
(Transf.) (i) the breath of life. (ii) divine or poetic inspiration.

She's stayed with him a while and they'd talked. Not about the important things of course; he'd put a silent embargo on any discussion of that sort with a close look from his remaining eye. Willow's imminent tears had been too much, and it was too soon for seriousness, for dealing. In-the-face-of-destruction comedy and card games with his favourite girl, that was about as much as Xander could stand.

Then eventually, she'd gone. Xander had begun to doze, shifting from one not-quite-reality to the next, aware all the time of a dull ache in his eye that his mind did not see fit to explain to him. It was all darkness and dreaming and confusion, blurring at the edges.

It's quiet now, night now. Just a few more of these endless hours until he's back with the gang and the mindless denial can start again. Until he can start forming all the usual barriers with his inappropriate humour again. He closes his eyes and thinks of Willow to try to stop his mind taking him there…

…thinks of Willow to keep his thoughts from forming

…to keep the pictures from coming…

It never works that way though, it never has.

Xander has never spoken about the things he sees. Who would he tell? It's not as if, as he always thinks, he could tell any of the Scooby core anything they don't already know. He remembers distinctly that Dawn had understood and that Giles had, acutely, during that summer when they were both pushed aside; the useless ones. But even in his daze he doubts that they would really understand these things he feels, sees, since he hardly does himself.

There are secret places in Xander's unconscious, dark storehouses of images. They float behind his ruined eyes: the secret inner visions of his friends; of their lives and purposes. He sees and feels them, picking up their moods and invisible intentions with a childlike osmosis. He is like the child watching from between the stair rails of the family home, his chin propped on fists, peering into those horribly adult lives that he cannot quite understand.

He thinks it's probably just his way to deal; all about the super-power thing.

_"Buffy. You know that you have a responsibility to maintain - "_

Buffy raises her eyebrows, "Maintain? And here was me thinking this was a born-to-it, innate talent sorta deal."

"Very well, enhance. Hone. Whatever the choice of vocabulary, Buffy, I must insist that you attend training…" And under his breath, Giles adds, "Some of the time at least."

"But, y'know, I've got this thing down, Giles. Really. A kick here, a punch there. It's a cinch, trust me."

"Buffy…"  
  
_"Okay, okay. I'm coming, but I want it noted that I'm grudging."_

"Oooh, me! I'll note the grudging for you, Buff, and from a standpoint of gloat-laden lack of responsibility."

"Gee thanks, Xand. You're off the Christmas list."

"Hey! Harsh much?" he calls to Buffy as she flounces out with Giles.

"It's maybe not the best of plans to taunt the Slayer, y'know Xand," Willow says, "because of the whole violence thing?"

"I wasn't taunting…there was this whole air of restrained compassion."

"I must have missed that part."

"Well, you don't pay attention," he says, with affection in his voice.

This kind of gentle conflict had been a once popular event in the Sunnydale dramatic calendar: the pull of official protocol, book learning and preparation versus the immediacy of instinctual violence, positively directed. Xander and Willow had always skirted the edges of the debate and had been perfectly happy to be tangential to the unwinnable unspoken war. They were a unit within themselves: the sidekicks. Quiet but deadly.

Or at least, she was deadly, these days. He was just quiet. And since the evil hand-of-God got friendly with his eye socket, Xander guessed that he'd probably keep on being just quiet. There wasn't a lot else on offer after all.

So he stays silent, as he always has been underneath the ill-timed jokes and self-conscious foolishness. A second watcher, doubly useless, is how his own role has come to seem to him. But doubt never stops the pictures coming, and soon the layers of Xander's mind are covered in the notes of his observations. Miniscule script climbing over his conscious thoughts, letters and words that form images both by association and in amidst their own patterns. Pictures in dreams that wake him in the middle of the night, his hand clutching at his stomach, where a sudden and unexplained pain rises.

The pictures come to him that night as he lies in his hospital bed, as he wonders if perhaps his medication is too strong since everything that is crawling through his mind seems that much stranger tonight. He keeps seeing her in the dreams: red hair and the empathy face (unwanted tears blurring eyes) and her cool pale hands cradling his. Willow, and power. Tremendous power.

It has always been Willow who keeps him grounded, even when he was too much of a child to realise it. She keeps him Xander by being Willow. It's a sidekick power. And it's necessary, frighteningly important even, that they be those people they always were, somehow. _Spiritus_ and _Animus_; life and affirmation, the cards that brought hope and light where all there had been before was violence and an unassailable ivory tower. Though he knows these things in his seer's heart, Xander cannot quite put words around the truths he finds there. For him, it all reduces to one simple principle: Willow good; Willow and Xander better together.

He knows that these are heavy days with no respite, that this is probably the _real _Armageddon but he cannot believe that they will lose, despite Buffy's pessimism and Giles' caution. He feels that somehow they still have the key to this thing, the ace in the pack. And as the REM sleep begins to fall from him he thinks he knows what it might be…remembering red hair and the tingle of power in pale fingers…

Though everything else is a confusing mosaic of possibly prophetic dreams, she stands clear in his heart. Willow, and power and a metallic tang in his mouth like bitter coffee. This taste that slides across his tongue as he stands at the door of waking conjures one more image for him…  
_woah, big scythe_…and his own voice, reassuring:

_"You can do it, Will. You're a goddess."_


End file.
